In the field of data processing, data processing automation products are known, specifically designed for automating the execution of tasks.
An example of a data processing automation product are the work scheduling products (shortly, “schedulers”), commonly used in data processing systems for automating the process of submitting and controlling the execution of large quantities of work units, like jobs in a batch processing. Generally speaking, the schedulers submit the jobs to be executed according to a predefined execution plan, which establishes a flow of execution of the jobs according to several factors, such as for example temporal constraints (e.g., date, time, day of the week) and dependencies (such as completion of preceding jobs). An example of scheduler is the “Tivoli Workload Scheduler”—“TWS”—by IBM Corporation.
Most often, automation products like the schedulers rely for their operation on a Job Entry Subsystem (JES), which, as known to those skilled in the art, is a batch processing subsystem of some operating systems (for example, MVS, OS/390 and z/OS by IBM Corporation) responsible of managing the activities that the operating system has to perform for executing the jobs submitted thereto. Essentially, the JES is a spooler, receiving the jobs to be executed, and putting them in a queue for later processing.
The data processing automation product, for example the scheduler, particularly the TWS, invokes the JES and passes thereto the specific jobs (described in the Job Control Language—JCL) for their execution; the JES manages the jobs execution, and returns the jobs execution results to the data processing automation product. The data processing automation product exploits the jobs execution results provided by the JES for the subsequent operations.